


Ceremony

by Darwin_xf



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-18
Updated: 2018-07-18
Packaged: 2019-06-12 03:45:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15331014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darwin_xf/pseuds/Darwin_xf
Summary: What’s left when words fail?





	Ceremony

**Author's Note:**

> I originally published this in January 2000.

 

 You are not my old friend.  
How did I used to sit  
and look at you? Now  
though I seem to be standing still  
I am flying flying flying  
in the trees of your eyes.  
       –from Marge Piercy’s “We Become New”

It’s a nice day for a white wedding.  
       -Billy Idol.

 

 

It's Friday so they ditch work early and drive away from what's become of their lives, north out of the District until the city is a dreary splotch in the rear view mirror of his car. They leave her car in the Hoover parking garage, even after being so careful that morning to arrive separately, demurely their own cars.

As though they hadn't been in his shower together an hour before, skin slipping against soapy skin. Sighing, laughing. He had made a Unicorn horn from her shampoo-stiff hair and she'd teased him, something about wasting his time casting far and wide for elusive mythical creatures when one had been in front of him all along.

"Yes," he'd said. "I've considered that."

The sudden sincerity in his voice had moved her, the way his eyes shifted toward his bony feet as he confessed this then found her face again. He kissed her as they rinsed off.

He drives through the suburban sprawl of Maryland, past the Borders and Blockbusters and Red Lobsters, and makes a right into Pennsylvania she's pretty sure, though if there'd been a marker she'd missed it. She smiles slightly as she replays the morning, reaching over with her hand to knead his thigh, reminding herself they are not headed to Allentown or Home or toward any other crouching horror, that they are not such separate vessels anymore, that she is allowed to touch him.

Work that week has been long, boring in the way that so many people's jobs are often boring, full of stuffy tense meetings to discuss budgets and allotments. Days like that should come as a relief to her. But, full of implications as they tend to be that she and her partner exist solely to defraud and defile the American taxpayer, they are not. All day she felt a desire to be anywhere else like an itch in the middle of her back she couldn't quite reach.

Mulder tapped his pencil on his legal pad, shifted in his seat and thrust his legs into the aisle like a peevish seventh grader. With the future of the human race looming uncertain and she being one of the very few humans to have a glimmer of knowledge about coming events, her baseline of anxiety has become a thrumming hive of bees in her gut. (No wondering where that imagery comes from.) In any case, the impetus to care about violent crime projections for ohtwo-ohthree is scarce.

They had the opportunity, mid-week, to take off to El Paso to check out a series of deaths that appeared to be the result of an ancient Aztec curse, if Mulder was to be believed. She didn't want to go, which didn't surprise her. But the weird part was that Mulder didn't seem to want to go either. Not really. She convinced him too easily that the deaths were most likely attributable to botulism, which, even she had to admit, was a stretch.

It comes down to this: Something is close. A change galactic in scale. A reckoning. She can feel it approaching the way a dog senses the mailman three blocks away. This vibe, this large shifting of atoms, this moment of green sky and silence before the twister touches down makes Scully want to lay low, to stay close to home, close to Mulder.

He senses it too she is pretty sure, though they don't discuss it. She doesn't want to know about this thing, tries to hold the information away from her in order to be safe from its implications. Like she did with her awareness of Mulder's feelings for her as they grew deeper, more complicated and decidedly sexual, and for the same reasons. But she knew, she knew. And she knows now.

Scully comes back to the moment, admonishes herself to be here in the car driving north on a two lane road into a Friday twilight with Mulder. Just now his wrists are bent against the steering wheel and he is tapping along to Jailhouse Rock, accompanying Elvis with an enthusiastic, off-key whistle. His white teeth are flashing. He's rolled his shirt sleeves to mid forearm and shed his suit jacket like a snakeskin on the back seat.

When he catches her looking, his predatory glance takes her in from the tip of her red head to the toes of her not-so-sensible shoes and she knows his tenebrous, tamped down mood of the week has lifted. She thinks it likely she will get into some type of trouble with him tonight.

Soon houses grow scarce and the dusk-lit sloping hills are dotted with Holsteins, black and white against the pale green early spring shoots of grass. They drive through Gettysburg where the fields that hosted some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War are indiscernible from those that lead up to them except that the blood-fed grass seems a little thicker here, greener and lusher. She pictures gashed and septic soldiers lying side by side in this field on a day not so long ago--a blink in geologic time--most of them dying slow musket-shot deaths and wondering, no doubt, what for.

They thought of their mothers, Scully is suddenly certain, most of them too young to have loved another fiercely and freely enough to replace her image. They had marched in twos and threes away from their homes weeks or months before, brimming with anticipation and confident of their own eventual heroic returns, unable to conceive of their own unexceptional if gory ends. She cracks her window and looks at the hills. They had been young too once, all craggy upthrust, sharpness and acute angles. But now they rise slowly, lazily above the fields. Old hills, worn down, they reassure her. She sucks in a breath of cold air and lets it wash over her.

Scully has left home a lot lately herself, literally and figuratively. It had been on her mind. Pfaster evicted her from her actual, physical dwelling of course. And though she tidied it up pretty well, she still didn't feel comfortable there. But he also stole away her idea of herself, Pfaster, the metaphorical home all sane people need to retreat to many times a day. She was now certain she hadn't been acting for God or for Satan when she shot an unarmed, subdued man, but rather for her most primitive self which the situation had shocked her back to. She was, after all her aspirations toward moral conduct and thirty years of honing her intellect, just another animal willing to kill when cornered. She didn't feel guilty, exactly, after shooting him. Just uncomfortable, different, humbled. New.

And there was something else, another lost home. As she sat crouched and bound in her bathroom, she wasn't thinking of her family like she had during other times of mortal danger, of how each member would feel to get that terrible phone call, of how her mother would bear to bury another daughter. She realized later a fact which astonished her: At some point in the not too distant past, her family had let her go of her. Lovingly, knowing they needed to, that she needed them to. They had released her unconditionally from all the things they had ever imagined for her and handed her over to her new fate, to her odd, brooding turkey of a partner and their unlikely and dangerous pursuit.

And when she had been scampering across the floor of her apartment, shards of glass digging into her knees and arms, there was raw fear, yes, and the concomitant reflexive impulse for self-protection. But what if not her family gave her the strength and will to fight him as hard as she had when most victims fold in fear, when that's what a part of her wanted to do? God, yes. Always God. But what tethered her to the earth? There was a one word answer to that question, and, as terrifying as it was, the answer was Mulder.

Mulder and their work he couldn't do alone. The fact that he would be curious the next day when she hadn't shown up at the office by nine-thirty, that he would spend the morning dialing her various numbers, shaking his head when he couldn't reach her but trying to reassure himself, ironically, that there was a reasonable explanation for her absence. He'd poke around the Hoover building, check the bullpen and the lunchroom and the lab. No one would have seen her. He would return to the basement and try to get involved with some new puzzle while unconsciously rehearsing the cool stare with which he would level her when she came through the door.

When he still hadn't reached her by lunch time, he'd decide to go to her apartment, having meanwhile convinced himself that she, ticked at him over the Orison case, was home sulking and sticking him with the paperwork, worrying him, making him come to her. And though it was unlike her, he'd think she was just capricious and cheeky enough to ditch him that day.

When he tried her on his cell for the umpteenth time on the way over in his car and it rang and rang, he'd force back anxiety by picturing her home splayed on her sofa still in her PJ's, spooning ice cream straight from the carton and watching a trashy morning talk show-- when he barged in maybe she'd even greet him with the title: "Help, I'm too fat to leave my house!"--but delivered in classic Scullyspeak, a monotonous deadpan into which she somehow injected untold subtleties.

She could see it all. Mulder would sit in his parked car outside her apartment for long minutes staring at his hands. When he had worked up the resolve to go in, he'd knock softly and then harder at her front door. When met with silence he'd use his key which he would have to fumble into the lock because his hands would be shaking so badly. And when he found her mutilated body in a bath of her own water-weakened blood, he would go insane.

No. It didn't end that way. She'd fight Pfaster to the death, but she wouldn't lie there and wait for the cavalry, wouldn't capitulate to this evil man for a second in hopes of saving herself through some strategic submission. She'd seen the glossies. She knew what was at stake. The moments before and after she shot Pfaster are not clear to her, grainy and chaotic as an eight millimeter home movie.

She remembers Mulder getting her a glass of water and sitting her down on the couch before calling for help and surveying the damage. He put out a few candles before giving up. He paced the apartment slowly, keeping a wide berth around Pfaster and his blood trickling in a thin stream toward the front door where it was collecting in a puddle, cooling and congealing. The apartment smelled of gunpowder and wax and rust. Scully drank her water. Periodically Mulder would find more wreckage and whistle softly, looking up at her like she was a cat who had just barked.

Dispossessed, she had packed her bag and they had gone to Mulder's place that day. There she had showered and then fallen into a dreamless nap on his bed that lasted well into the evening. When she woke up and stumbled into the front room, Mulder stood at the window in his plaid pajama bottoms and his Knicks T-shirt, his is back to her. The room was lit only by the muted television the screen flashing the frenetic colors of a basketball game.

Lost in thought, he didn't seem to hear her approach from behind. She closed her hands around his waist and pressed her cheek into his back, between his scapula. He started at the contact before settling easily into her embrace. She imagined she heard his intelligence, his Mulderness, humming like electricity, running up and down his body along the lines of synapses centered in his spine. She thought of all the times she'd nearly lost him and what a miracle it was, he was, and the happy accident that they both stood whole and sane in his living room. She breathed him deeply, his clean and complicated scent, so many layers. Without weighing options or even thinking at all, she reached her hands up under his shirt and rubbed her palms slowly over his flanks.

When he didn't stop her or turn around, she let her hands run up to his ribs and back again. Then she did it again. She closed her eyes as she rubbed her hands over his smooth skin, letting one hand settle on his diaphragm and brushing the hand other lower, down the midline of his body until she encountered the scritch of coarse hair near the waistband of his sweats. She rested her hand on his belly and ran the other one up his sternum, encountering his armor. She marveled at how hard he was, how soft, how he seemed to have quit breathing.

But when her fingers found one of his nipples and played over it lightly while her other hand rubbed his stomach languorously, his chest expanded sharply before he resumed taking quick shallow breaths. Against her fingertips his nipple was tender and-- later Scully thought this odd-- cold. In all the years she had known him and in all the states of undress in which she'd tended to him, she didn't think she'd ever touched him there before. Or at least not intentionally.

And what was her intent, exactly? At that point she couldn't say. She rubbed her chin against his back. She felt light with danger and anticipation, like her foot was feeling around for the brake pedal but couldn't locate it.

"Scully," he said. He was pleading. He turned and gathered her up so carefully she knew that he didn't understand. He was writing off her advances to shock and desperation. But she didn't need to be held so much healed seam to seam. Subsumed and recreated. Fucked.

Scully, in the remote corner of her brain which wasn't shut down by the sensation of Mulder's trapezius muscles shaking slightly beneath her hands or his erection jousting with her hip bone, was beginning to understand. This odd, unexpected seduction she was apparently determined to carry out was just a logical extension of her behavior from the day before with Pfaster. When its home is razed a good animal, one intent on survival, rebuilds. And this is a catastrophic process, this tearing down and building up. It requires drastic action, real change, courage. She needed him to help her.

This wasn't just about Pfaster, though; he had only been a harbinger of all the big changes afoot, the catalyst for this reconfiguration, her to Mulder, that needed to happen anyway. They would need a new home front from which to battle whatever was to come in whatever way they could, a home their bodies and hearts could create together, a virtual but very real space that would give them potency and respite. They already had such a space, she supposed, but this new thing would consecrate their bond, strengthen instead of weaken them as they had always feared. Whether it was the chip in her neck talkin' to her again, her tattoo doing likewise, or her some deep hitherto untapped intuition she couldn't say, but she knew this was right.

Mulder had been skeptical.

Convincing him had been the sweetest task of her life.

They drive and drive until the sky is dark except for a streak of pink on the far western horizon. Porch lights go on and she imagines she and Mulder in one of these houses, preparing a meal, watching TV, arguing over whose turn it is to pay the bills. It's a normal life, all right, and appealing in its own way. But now she knows that if that were she and Mulder they wouldn't be she and Mulder. If she ever really thought that's who she was supposed to be she'd given up that old image of herself, of the two of them. Her stomach rumbles at the thought of food.

She'd been too nauseous to eat at lunch time and Mulder'd looked up from his pastrami long enough to quirk an eyebrow in her direction about it. She'd just really begun to eat normally, three weeks after Pfaster, and he registered slight concern without grilling her, all of which she appreciated. He looks over at her now his eyes soft, just back from a daydream.

"Hungry?" he asks.

"I suppose. Where are we anyway?"

"Donno, exactly. I think we're by Amish country though," he says, pointing to a yellow road sign with a buggy on it. "If we can't find a restaurant we can shoot one of these cows and barbecue."

Just when she's resigned herself to eating in a roadside diner that features chicken and waffles, they stumble on an Italian place which looks cozy and authentic, a mirage amid the fields of corn and fuzzy blue-green oats. As they read the menu taped to the front door, she gets excited at the prospect of good food and of eating out with him without watching the door, being able to touch hands over the table, snatch bites from each other's forks, share dessert. Maybe they can't have any kind of regular life, but being able to have this night with him makes her happier than she can explain.

Hours later, she tastes the meal again in his mouth as they kiss on his bed. They've been kissing since they got back from their long drive, rolling around a little and talking in low rough voices, but always returning to the kissing. She tilts her head, dives in to his mouth and loses track of everything like she's entered a wormhole in time. They're marooned on the peninsula of his bed, she decides. And when it occurs to her that it would be unlikely for anyone to be marooned on a peninsula, she angrily banishes her smarmy critical mind and sticks her tongue deeper into his mouth.

The outer limits of this universe she decrees they're inhabiting this night contain the shifting geometric patterns of passing headlights thrown across the ceiling and his fish tank giving off weak light and gurgling in the next room. Tonight the stars are only pricks of light in the sky blinking stupidly, all hot gas and bluster, perhaps even dead. If she's been there she doesn't remember, didn't drag any dust back on her shoes. And though there's hard evidence of their work-a-day lives everywhere, manila X-files strewn across his coffee table, a cryptic message from the Gunmen blinking on the machine, a picture of the flukeman tacked to the bulletin board, the drive and the meal and the wine have cleared all that from her head.

Here tonight there are no conspiracies, no genetic mutants or Grays or apocalyptic blueprints, no endless jawing in hallways or banter or paperwork, no gruesome slide shows or cancer or moth men, no rental cars, no stiff necks or bleary eyed nights or delayed flights. Her universe contracts to his breath hot in her ear, to his Adam's apple bobbing in his throat and the rasp of his stubble against her neck, to his sighs his hands reaching up under her skirt and stroking her thighs, to his swollen lips that have by now kissed her everywhere.

When she thinks of that her brain still unhinges, her stomach goes south. He is still so new to her, these things they are doing so unbelievable and wondrous. Mulder's bones, the casual heaviness of him. His long thigh pressing between her legs.

She feels their daytime personas falling away, too, as they kiss. He doesn't need to be more persuasive than this, his hard cock knifing between them against her stomach not inspiring the tiniest bit of skepticism in her. Mulder gets up suddenly and crosses the room. She eyes his long body wolfishly as he tugs his already loosened tie over his head, unclasps his watch and lays it on the dresser, unbuttons his dress shirt and drops in onto a chair.

More comfortable in only his rumpled dress pants and his T-shirt, he returns to the bed. Backlit by the kitchen bulb, he becomes a shadowy, haloed figure crawling toward her, a creature that has clawed its way from the center of the earth to devour her. But he doesn't scare her. Even occluded he is somehow familiar, her brother from that other world where the roots are flowers.

He falls next to her and grabs her up and they shift on his half made bed so she can make out his face again, his strong jaw and the hook of his nose, his eyes that continually elude her. When he's angry or aroused she sees hard and glinty agates. When he's sad or sated, sea water. She rubs his cheek with her palm, smoothing over a place he had nicked himself with the razor. She wonders where this man had come from and what cosmic mix up had paired them in this life. He seems more the love child of Uri Geller and Sigmund Freud than the product of his tepid, unexceptional parents, with a dash of Buddy Holly thrown in and enough Batman to keep them alive.

He is kinetic energy encapsulated with the eyes of a sea turtle, the moves of a gazelle, and the hairdo of a hedgehog; he is dark and light, kindness and cruelty, id and superego, guilt and justification, all colliding violently under his ribs and collapsing, whirling pulsar-like. She knows him. This is his heart. And he is her mate.

She looks into his eyes and wishes it were summer already. He smiles at her and it seems as if he wants to speak but that the words aren't there. He does this a lot, looks at her like the empty gumball machine of his brain isn't dispensing any words today, no matter how many dimes he's fed it. Mulder, a man who can pontificate in excruciating detail on a thousand subjects interesting only to him, is speechless before her, in the face of her, of this new thing that they are.

She hasn't yet gotten used to his silences or his eyes on her like this so it still unsettles her, makes her blood fizzy. And she shares his problem. She can't possibly make words come together in a way that will remotely convey what is in her head and her heart. What would she say that wouldn't sound hackneyed and adolescent, trite or rehearsed? All the words in the register of love have been used up by bad movies and sitcoms, stripped of their power. There is nothing left to say.

They show each other instead. This works for them. They had worn each other out and showed no signs of slowing their pace. He is, as she suspected he would be, an amazing lover: limber, obsessive in all the right ways, orally-fixated. More importantly, he has a way of stripping her of her inhibitions, of disarming her with humor and somehow at the same time referencing their complete trust in one another with just a glance or a few words. And Mulder is so comfortable naked and appreciative of her body that she's grown used to seeing herself as beautiful again, to viewing her body as more than functional at best, spring loaded to betray her at worst.

She finds she uses her voice more when they make love than she ever has with anyone else. He likes it when she's specific. She likes it when he likes it. So she says things, asks for things, that make her blush later when she's away from him and they float back to her sounding like the disembodied scraps of dialogue she'd occasionally hear drifting out from under his door when she'd come by in the evening for an unscheduled visit. Those times she'd freeze her fist in a pre-knock position and consider whether she really needed to interrupt him, whether the errand she'd come on was worth the awkwardness of waiting the long, weight-shifting, hallway minutes for him to answer the door. Sometimes he looked annoyed she'd bothered'd him, sometimes just embarrassed. Either way, the exchange that followed always left her unaccountably sad. She didn't dare pause long enough to analyze that emotion, either.

Sex with Mulder, once an appealing if prohibitively dangerous idea, is now a daily need. She gets her recommended daily allowance, usually after work at his apartment. One time in the office, though they swore they wouldn't ever.

It was crazy. After they had been kissing and teasing each other too long--she had started it--he spun her around and bent her over the desk, leaned against her back and asked her in a low growl if she wanted it. When she didn't answer he yanked up her skirt, drew his engorged penis out from his fly, pushed her underwear roughly aside and jammed himself inside of her. She was stunned, her mouth hanging open as she contemplated his jar of pencils and waved her ass higher to facilitate a better angle of penetration.

It was surreal. His hands were gripping her waist tightly as he slapped his hips against her ass and she was trying not to moan. And as fast and hard as he had fucked her, she had come twice. It was as though sex had been invented for them. They were not well.

It certainly was a different thing with him than it had been with anyone else, sex. She was different. She couldn't believe they'd spent so many years not touching each other everywhere like this. She knew rationally that those years had built to this, that it was so good between them because of the combination of the mysteries they were uncovering and the extant trust. Still, when she ended each day naked and pressed against Mulder, she often had the nagging, regretful feeling that she'd been making beef stew for dinner every night for years and leaving out the beef.

Though it occurs to her to do so, she doesn't stop him when, after an hour or more of this infernal kissing on the bed, he undoes the buttons of her blouse one by one, unfastens her bra and takes her breasts in his hands, cradles the soft weight of them. He rolls the nipples between his fingers then brushes the sensitive tips lightly with the pads of his thumbs. He moves maddeningly slowly. She loves how his big hands shift beneath her shirt, the distant look in his eyes, the way his tongue darts between his lips to moisten them like he has engaged only the oldest, most reptilian part of his brain for this task.

When he bends down and takes one of her nipples into his mouth, she reels in the sensation of him strumming the tip; her clit records each pass of his tongue. He bites down and she squirms against the mattress almost whimpering, her legs treading water, struggling for purchase.

She glances toward him just as his eyes open to meet hers, her breast still in his mouth and his tongue rubbing slowly over her, soothing her now, and they exchange silent endearments, their eyes crinkling almost like they're in pain. She reaches down and brushes the hair from his eyes which haven't left her face.

When he starts working her nipple with the edges of his teeth again she lets her eyelids fall slowly, languidly closed to show him how it feels, to let him know how she can't even bear what he is doing to her.

When she comes back to herself reluctantly, her nipple is still swimming in the warm pool of his mouth and he is reaching up beneath her skirt, playing with the lacy edge of her underwear. She opens her eyes and takes hold of his wrist, stopping his progress. His eyes question her.

Scully is abruptly nervous, her mouth that had been watering a minute ago drying out. Because she can't have the light of his eyes on her while she says what she needs to say, she puts her mouth up close to his ear and whispers it. "Remember when I got cranky the other day about the expense report and you muttered something under your breath about PMS?"

He pulls back and looks at her. "I think I'll take the fifth here, Scully."

She smiles slightly. "You were right. That's what it was. PMS."

Mulder, his acuity depressed by a lack of blood to his brain, takes a few seconds to connect the dots. "Ahhh," he says. "So is it safe to say that today you no longer have PMS?"

"Safe to say."

"Does that mean you have MS now Scully?" Mulder says, sitting up slightly in mock-panic. Then: "No, that doesn't sound right."

She bites his arm, though she's grateful for the joke. Her nervousness washes away. She had planned to go home to fall asleep next to Mulder without things getting too lascivious for once. But then he tasted so good she eighty-sixed that plan without making a new one. Her imminent confession had been bothering her ever since, a pebble in her shoe.

"So," he says leaning over her on one elbow, his eyes shifting over her body. "You want to make out some more and then go to sleep?"

"That sounds nice," she says. It does. Nice. But after an hour of wrestling on the bed with him she doesn't want nice. Lust boils her blood and her skin burns like shards of glass are working their way out. She has never had sex when she had her period, had never really wanted to. But when Mulder rolls on top of her and crushes her mouth with his he feels so good against her aching pelvis, the weight of him. His lovely cock taut and pressing down on her hip. God.

Then the room spins and she's on top of him kissing him hard, plundering his mouth, grinding herself against him. She rolls to the side and her hand is under his shirt, bumping over his ribs, threading through the coarse hairs on his belly. He shudders when her fingers wander south past his belt buckle and wedge under the waistband of his boxers, when the back of her hand grazes the smooth head of his cock.

"Scully," he says sharply, grabbing her hand.

"Huh?" she says, blinking at him line she's just come out of hibernation. She's lost to the world, three sheets to the wind, addled with lust.

"Maybe we should take this down a notch if we plan to get any sleep at all."

"Sorry," she says, rolling off him.

"Don't be," he says and laughs darkly. They lay side by side holding hands and breathing like they've been doing wind sprints. As if keeping with the theme, Mulder gets up and changes into sweats, stripping off his clothes like they burn his skin, then goes into the kitchen drinks a glass of water straight down.

As he prowls through the apartment shutting off lights and brushing his teeth, bolting the door and feeding his fish, she slips out of her clothes and into her Pajamas and gets ready for sleep.

When they meet back in bed minutes later he rolls toward her and wraps her in his arms, kisses her forehead. She nestles into his chest, raises her knees between them until they bump against his still stiff prick. They laugh softly. She leaves them there.

He yawns and his breathing begins to settle down. She wills her blood to recede, to lay low in her veins. She wants one more kiss so she plants a quick one on his lips. He opens his eyes and kisses her nose sleepily then puts his lips to her ear and whispers the secret sweet thing they've both known for ages but that they've rarely voiced, the way they're not supposed to feel about each other but do anyway. She nods at him. Then he tells her to sleep well.

She burrows her face into his breastbone, rubs her chin against the broad plane of his pectoral. Her lips, seemingly of their own accord, drop hard little kisses across his chest. They radiate out from his heart like a trail of stones so that if she ever gets lost she can find her way back.

As she descends down his torso his skin grows softer. No bones to prop it up. Organs below. Her kisses against his belly turn slack and wet, open-ended.

"Scully?" She jams her tongue experimentally in his belly button as a reply. "Scully?"

Why is he pestering her? Can't he see she's occupied?

"Hmmmm?" she answers, not wanting to stop kissing him long enough to make words.

"What are you doing?" She tears herself away from her task, sighs, considers as she scooches back up his body.

"Trying to get to third base." He laughs, his eyes squinty and warm looking down his body at her. The baseball metaphors are fun for them. She is amusing him tonight at least.

She loves his chest, loves running her hands over the slow curves of it, wants to spend the rest of her life contemplating it, to eat all her meals from it and sleep with the matted strip of hair that runs up its center brushing her cheek forever. Clearly her need to come is making her irrational. She takes his nipple between her teeth and bites it.

"If you do that one more time, Scully, I'm going to be able to pound nails without aid of a hammer until noon tomorrow."

"Why don't you let me help you with that?"

She reaches for the drawstring to his sweat pants. More for her own sake than for his, even, she wants to take him into her mouth, to have something substantial to suck on that might pacify her cravings. She wants to hold his cock against the sides of her cheeks like ice against a bruise.

"Are you asking me to show you mine while you aren't willing to show me yours, Agent?"

He divests his body of her grabby hands and backs away from her, tucks the sheet around his waist chastely.

"You've seen mine by now I think Mulder." 

“Nevertheless, as capable as I know you are of relieving my little situation, and as much as I can't believe I'm saying this, I think it's only fair we both go to bed equally frustrated."

Scully groans and rolls away from him onto her stomach. Mulder rolls on top of her quick like he's going in for the pin, and again she's struck by how good the weight of him feels on top of her, pressing her into the mattress, grounding her.

"You're really hot tonight, aren't you Scully? He is whispering, rasping the words into her ear. She nods. "So is this a policy, no sex during your period?"

She shrugs.

"Nothing official, huh?"

Between sentences he's kissing the back of her neck, nudging the tender flesh under her ears.

"Will it hurt you?"

She shakes her head no. Actually she knows that orgasms during her period help alleviate her cramps, though she won't be going into this with him now.

"Is this something you've just never done?"

She nods.

"Because I should tell you that the idea isn't distasteful to me. Not at all."

She brings in her breath and holds it.

"In fact, it's just the opposite."

"Oh Mulder," she says, her voice half stolen by the pillow, "I just don't think I can."

"Why not? You don't recoil in horror from the fluids my body produces. Why would I recoil from yours?"

"This is different. It would make a mess. And your sheets..."

"I have lots of sheets."

She cranes her neck around and raises a skeptical eyebrow in his direction.

"Okay, I don't have lots of sheets. But I think I have another set around here somewhere. Maybe even clean."

She smiles and feels him smiling too against her neck just to the right of her implant scar.

"We could get a towel and put it beneath us if you're worried about the mess. We'll just toss it in the hamper when we're done and then you and me can hop in the shower. End the day like we started it."

His rationalizations are starting to persuade her. Or maybe it's the fact that he hasn't stopped pulsing his hips against her ass. She had been letting her legs fall open as they spoke and now she`s raising up on her knees slightly to let his cock, barely constrained by the thin material of his sweats, slide along her swollen lips through her pajamas. Their bodies are, as usual, having a conversation all their own.

"I know you're not squeamish, Scully."

"It's just so... personal."

"That's why I want to do it."

Scully draws in her breath. The head of his cock is nudging her clit. Mulder, sensing his bulls eye, steadies himself there and begins to rock infinitesimally against her. That more than anything he can say begins to sway her.

"You sure?" she asks.

In response Mulder begins to really move his hips against her. She spreads her legs further and raises herself higher into the air and he is rubbing the top half of his cock against her slit in earnest now, his head making unbearably intermittent contact with her clit. It feels so amazing, though, that she is sure she can come just from this if it goes on much longer, if he finds any kind of rhythm at all. His voice is strained with arousal, his fists white and pressed into the mattress on either side of her when he speaks next.

"Scully, I'm so sure I'm about to beg, here. God. Please. You feel so good. Let me take your pants off."

He is heaving short hot exhales into her ear as he rubs against her faster now, harder, his hips making square contact with her ass with each thrust. Then his hands are working at her pajama bottoms, trying to push them down over her hips as he breathes into her ear, "Please, Scully, let me fuck you."

She rolls out from under him and disappears into the bathroom, leaving him to mumble feverishly to himself.

Goddamn her stupid period. She had begun in the past few years to hate its useless carnage and pain, a war that she still had years to fight but couldn't ever win. And all that was before she had a lover who had ejaculated on or around her cervix so often in the past few weeks that she had begun to feel inevitably fertile, like he was pumping her full of babies.

And when she was honest with herself she had to admit that she always thought somehow, someway, someday they would come. She had to concede at least that now was a bad time, the worst time even, for babies. In fact, if she thought they would listen she would tell everyone to stop having babies until the coast was clear. But at the same time Scully couldn't keep the thought from her head that if she got pregnant, they would have to deal with it... So the dark streak of blood she found in her underwear at noontime was an unexpected disappointment, a theoretical loss becoming an actual one.

She cried a few hot tears in the bathroom in the basement before chiding herself for getting her hopes up. She took three advil, put a tampon in, washed her face, and was nearly herself again before Mulder was back with their sandwiches.

In the bathroom now she slips out of her pajamas and folds them neatly, takes a towel from the stack on the shelf. She empties her bladder and removes her tampon. She is wet for him; her insides feel swollen to bursting. Then she can't believe she is about to do this, almost puts her clothes back on. But something stops her. Maybe it's a deep-seated desire to reinscribe her period. Maybe she's still just too horny for words. Probably both. She drinks a glass of very cold water to stiffen her resolve, knots the towel around her waist and makes herself push open the door into the dark coolness of the hallway.

Mulder is under the covers when she enters the bedroom again, but he peels them back to invite her into his bed. In so doing he exposes his now naked body to her. His cock is straining toward her, pink and bright against his dark matted hair. He is offering himself to her, exposing himself to make her feel less vulnerable. Always the psychologist, Mulder.

Besides which, he is a total exhibitionist. Which is actually okay by her. She would never admit to him or to anyone how much she likes his little light saber, his pocket shape-shifter. She appreciates the way it bows slightly toward the heavens but still has an agenda all its own, a personality far more bubbly and resilient than Mulder's. She thinks of his cock as the place where Mulder begins, where you'd have to start if you were going to draw him.

"You," he says, shaking his head. He says this word a thousand ways. Tonight it conveys admiration, affection, awe. She lies down carefully, flat on her back. Mulder unknots the towel and spreads it neatly beneath them while letting his eyes run down her body. When he's finished he traces a line down her jaw with his finger. He moves slowly and in the sparse light of the bedroom his hands seem to leave trails like comets. She wonders briefly if it's possible he's giving off some light of his own like some rocks deep in the earth are said to do, if he'd brought this small bit of luminescence up with him from his murky depths.

She reaches down and wraps her hand around him, drags the pad of her thumb in slow circles over the sensitive tip of his urethra and spreads the wetness beading there over the soft papery skin. He draws a deep uneven breath, lets it out. She still has an urge to kiss it right there on the fat head, but she doesn't want to move around too much.

"Nothing too acrobatic," she warns him. She still holds him in her fist, half a promise half a threat. She's tense, afraid to move.

"No." he says, shaking his head earnestly. "Just you and me. Just this."

He kisses her lips for the hundredth time that night, but just so tenderly this time. His mouth is so soft on hers it makes her either want to cry or burst into flames. He brings his body down to hers and she parts her legs to receive him. He holds her face between his hands as she reaches down and guides his cock inside her.

"Ahhh," he says as she slips him in. An understatement. Scully turns her head almost wincing from the pleasure of it. And she knows he feels it too, how good it is tonight, the over-ready walls of her cunt grabbing him with the an amazing combination of softness and pressure.

She plants her feet on either side of him and he rocks in and out, locking into her eyes. "Sc.." is all he can say of her name and his eyes fill with water. She is so sensitive, so ready, that she can feel every inch of him, can make out the ridge of his swollen head as it strokes her on the inside. She wraps her legs around his waist locking her ankles, keeping him near her. He groans at her getsture, kisses her mouth hard.

Intercourse, which usually strafes her a little, couldn't possibly tonight. It feels perfect, like they could find a nice easy rhythm and do just this for hours. She looks down where their bodies joined, to where his cock is moving in and out of her coated with her bright blood.

Married, her brain supplies. We are married. She has left her home for him, her family. And he who never had a home had left parts of himself behind to meet her here: his armor of knee-jerk cynicism, his fearful refusal to act on this. She wants him deeper.

"Mulder," she says over his shoulder. He's begun to nibble her neck.

"Hmm," he says.

"Come here."

He brings his face to hers. "I want to be on top."

"Absolutely," he says, nodding.

It isn't graceful, but she climbs into his lap and he sits up against the headboard, tosses pillows to the floor. She straddles him, centers herself and sinks down, impaling herself again as his arms wrap tightly around her, holding her in place.

She strings her arms around the back of his neck loosely, arches her neck toward him and sighs. She is flush to his groin and he is deeper than he's ever been. She can feel him in her chest, in her arms, in her tight throat.

With their height difference this is a good position for them, allowing them to be face to face as they fuck, mouth to mouth. He initiates a kiss to occupy her while he reaches his fingers down to explore their joining.

She doesn't want to look, but she can feel her blood pooling beneath her on him, stickier than the lubricant she is also producing, and she wants to tell him to stop before she makes his hand dirty.

But he is filling her again and again, jarring her harder with each thrust and she doesn't have any breath. He takes her clit between his index finger and his thumb, grasps it deep at its root and pulls gently, drawing it out and away from her body.

"Oh," she hears herself say. Then he's repeating the motion, gripping and tugging her clit, pulling at her again and again, accelerating as she grows slicker. He's jerking me off, she thinks and almost laughs out loud. Instead she grasps his shoulders and rides him. She moans in a full-throated way because if he stops doing that with his fingers she will die.

But he doesn't stop and his cock is still sliding in and out of her and the combined sensations are more than she can stand. She is rising and falling on him, panting in his ear. Though she usually plateaus for long periods of time and comes so unobtrusively that he has to ask her if it's happened yet, this time her orgasm is like a light bulb exploding, hard and sharp, surprising and cataclysmic.

When the waves of pleasure subside her brain gets a hit of oxygen and she realizes that she cried out when she came, that she is moaning some more as she comes down. And then she is babbling into his ear, telling him how she loves him, loves him.

This time he knows for sure she's come, she can tell by his cocky smile and the fact that he has released her clit.

She wonders if whoever moved into Padget's place knows she's come too, then decides she doesn't care.

In fact, she suddenly hopes that what's left of the consortium is listening through a bug in the lava lamp, that Krycek is eyeing them through a zoom lens from across the street and wishing like hell he had two good hands so that he could beat himself off as he snapped pictures, that They are hovering just above the cloud line monitoring this new development, scratching their pointy chins at how unnecessary it all is, how messy and incomprehensible. She doesn't feel bad or wrong or caught. She is just glad to be finally behaving like a normal human specimen.

Mulder is trying to give her some recovery time because she is quivering in his arms like protoplasm. Though he is still hard inside her, he all but stops moving his hips, kisses her hair, calls her baby which she's never let anyone get away with before. When he says it is okay, though, not meant to make her feel diminutive, just cherished.

Soon he grows needy and is jamming himself into her again, almost throwing her off him with each thrust. But each time she threatens to fly up and away his arms catch her and pull her back down to him. And then he is coming too and when he stiffens and fills her he is almost howling. As he begins to go soft he is talking again, "thank you ... god Scully...god...so good."

They grow still leaning against each other. She curls into his chest and listens to the crazy drum of his heart until it evens out and slows. He strokes her back lightly. She begins to feel like maybe she could talk again, though she has no particular desire to.

As they cool together she becomes conscious of the tacky mess between them again, of the slip of come and blood that was supposed to create and nourish their child in her womb but that is instead seeping from her open wound that will never heal, dripping down between them onto the sheets. She doesn't know where the towel is. She is crying.

"Mulder," she says, pushing away from him. She is tired and just wants to get cleaned up and go to sleep. She hopes he doesn't notice her tears.

"Shhh," he says, pulling her back to his chest. She lets him rock her.

"Scully," he says suddenly, cupping her chin, making her look at him, "this is all that matters to me. We're going to have this always." He is fierce, talking like he usually only does just before he comes.

"Yes," she says. "We will."

She almost believes it. And she could relax and enjoy it if the future weren't looming inescapable above them, a hefted piano dangling from a threadbare rope.

He senses the lie in her voice, she thinks, needs more. He moves his hand from her chin to her lips and rubs the back of his fingers against them. She is still. Then he drops his hand and runs his knuckles down her body until he reaches the damp pelt of her pubic hair. Their sex is done; she feels rubbery as a deboned chicken.

"Mulder," she says drawing his name out, warning him.

"S'okay," he says. "Let me."

She grows silent, enraptured by his moves, curious.

He extends two fingers and runs them along her cunt lips slowly and carefully. She doesn't respond except to continue eyeing him.

She smells the iron in her blood, their sweat and sex. He is moving slowly, deliberately, stalking her like a big cat.

When she thinks he's about to withdraw his hand, he plunges four fingers deeply inside her. She gasps, sure he has finally lost his mind. Then he withdraws his fingers slowly and holds them up to the sliver of light coming from the bathroom; they glisten with blood.

She is mesmerized. He presses his wet fingers low on his belly, just above the root of his cock. Slowly he draws them up his own body until he is streaked with war paint, marred with her blood.

His eyes come up and search her face as his hand grows still over his heart.

She nods at him, indicating that she understands. He is her family now, and she is his. Blood is what they are, all that is visible of their bond. That this is their ceremony, their sacrament, necessarily private and all they will ever get. But that it's a lot, that it's what they will need to go forward, that it is everything.

They both swallow hard. She covers his hand with her own, twines his fingers through his over his heart and finds his eyes. 

Later, they are in the shower. They have stripped the bed and changed the sheets. She lathers him everywhere and he does her.

Too tired to stand, they lean on one another as they rinse off. Pink bubbles slide down their legs and soon they are squeaky clean like children again.

He dries her hair with a fluffy towel. She is tired like she has been crying a long time, drained but peaceful.

"Hey," he says, standing in the bathroom, thumbing her cheek, "You want to go to Mexico with me?"

"What's in Mexico? More goat suckers?"

She is woozy, leaning on him and slurring her speech, half listening.

"No. A good deal on a yacht."

He has her attention.

"We can cash in our chips and buy a boat. We can be at sea when this thing goes down."

"No," she says immediately, shaking her head. "That isn't right. That isn't how it ends."

He is nodding, a half smile on his face. Without really trying to, she has given him the answer he needs.

"Thanks for asking, though. That's sweet." She says this like she's just declined his offer to rub her back.

She smiles ruefully at her weird life, kisses his chest.

As they climb into bed and as sleep comes up to claim her she wonders if she would banish what she knows, if such a thing were possible. Forget the terrifying shreds of knowledge they've compiled, frustratingly incomplete as they are. Especially since the correct actions they might ever take are all but impossible to discern.

Sleep will come before an answer like that. There will be no unlearning, no feigning ignorance, no running. He would hate her for asking him to try. They are who they are. They know what they know. And because of that, they will do what they have to do.

**Author's Note:**

> I re-published this to have all my fanfic here on AO3. 
> 
> I made a few little changes, fixing things that always irked me about it.
> 
> I left a few things that irk me too because it was published a long time ago and what’s done is done, ya know?
> 
> The original is still at good ole Gossamer.
> 
> Reading this again takes me back. I wrote this over a few days just after the world didn’t end in January 2000.
> 
> I had just months before moved to a brand new (to me) freezing cold city with a partner, but after five years together we immediately broke up. So this fic was born in a frigid lonesome place. 
> 
> It kept me company then, and I’ve gotten a lot of nice feedback on it since. 
> 
> Which is why I decided to write some more fanfic...
> 
> Thanks for reading and, those of you who do, writing as well. It means something.
> 
> Peace and love, xo -Darwin


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